ABSTRACT
The idea of stakeholders is quite old, growing up in the 1960s through the work of management theorists Eric Rhenman, Igor Ansoff, Russell Ackoff and their students. During the 1980s the idea of “stakeholder management” was articulated as a method for systematically taking into account the interests of “those groups, which can affect and are affected by the corporation”. From Cadbury to Volvo, Nordstrom to Hewlett-Packard, executives are constantly engaged in intense stakeholder relationships. Value is created because stakeholders can jointly satisfy their needs and desires. Cooperating with stakeholders and motivated by values, business people continuously create new sources of value. Competition is important in stakeholder capitalism but it is not the primary force, as so many business thinkers claim. Political regimes have been liberalized so that everyone is adopting some version of capitalism or market mechanisms, yielding the possibility for unprecedented worldwide growth.
